Good News: We Saved the Bees. Bad News: We Saved the Wrong Ones. (msn.com) 40
Despite urgent pleas to Americans to save the honeybees, "it was all based on a fallacy," writes Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. "Honeybees were never in existential trouble. And well-meaning efforts to boost their numbers have accelerated the decline of native bees that actually are."
"Suppose I were to say to you, 'I'm really worried about bird decline, so I've decided to take up keeping chickens.' You'd think I was a bit of an idiot," British bee scientist Dave Goulson said in a video last year. But beekeeping, he went on, is "exactly the same with one key difference, which is that honeybee-keeping can be actively harmful to wild-bee conservation." Even from healthy hives, diseases flow "out into wild pollinator populations."
Honeybees can also outcompete native bees for pollen and nectar, Milbank points out, and promote non-native plants "at the expense of the native plants on which native bees thrive." Bee specialist T'ai Roulston at the University of Virginia's Blandy Experimental Farm here in Boyce warned that keeping honeybees would "just contribute to the difficulties that native bees are having in the world." And the Clifton Institute's Bert Harris, my regular restoration ecology consultant in Virginia, put it bluntly: "If you want to save the bees, don't keep honeybees...."
Before I stir up a hornet's nest of angry beekeepers, let me be clear: The save-the-pollinator movement has, overall, been enormously beneficial over the past two decades. It helped to get millions of people interested in pollinator gardens and wildflower meadows and native plants, and turned them against insecticides. A lot of honeybee advocacy groups promote native bees, too, and many people whose environmental awakening came from the plight of honeybees are now champions of all types of conservation...
But if your goal is to help pollinators, then the solution is simple: Don't keep honeybees... The bumblebees, sweat bees, mason bees, miner bees, leafcutters and other native bees, most of them solitary, ground-nesting and docile, need your help. Honeybees do not.
The article calls it "a cautionary tale about the unintended consequences that emerge when we intervene in nature, even with the best of intentions."
Honeybees can also outcompete native bees for pollen and nectar, Milbank points out, and promote non-native plants "at the expense of the native plants on which native bees thrive." Bee specialist T'ai Roulston at the University of Virginia's Blandy Experimental Farm here in Boyce warned that keeping honeybees would "just contribute to the difficulties that native bees are having in the world." And the Clifton Institute's Bert Harris, my regular restoration ecology consultant in Virginia, put it bluntly: "If you want to save the bees, don't keep honeybees...."
Before I stir up a hornet's nest of angry beekeepers, let me be clear: The save-the-pollinator movement has, overall, been enormously beneficial over the past two decades. It helped to get millions of people interested in pollinator gardens and wildflower meadows and native plants, and turned them against insecticides. A lot of honeybee advocacy groups promote native bees, too, and many people whose environmental awakening came from the plight of honeybees are now champions of all types of conservation...
But if your goal is to help pollinators, then the solution is simple: Don't keep honeybees... The bumblebees, sweat bees, mason bees, miner bees, leafcutters and other native bees, most of them solitary, ground-nesting and docile, need your help. Honeybees do not.
The article calls it "a cautionary tale about the unintended consequences that emerge when we intervene in nature, even with the best of intentions."
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It's amusing watching people cling desperately to the old "Climate Change" Narrative when it's been thrown under the bus because we need massive, reliable power generation to keep AI data centres running.
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What's amusing about it ? The threat of climate change hasn't changed. The severe negative impact looming in the distance is getting closer, and the AI build out is going to speed it up. What's amusing ?
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Oh, I know the threat of climate change hasn't changed; the very same people are flying their personal jets, then arriving with their personal montage of 50 vehicles at these luxury locations in order to tell me that I need to pay more to drive my car back and forth to work.
It's existential!
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It's amusing watching people cling desperately to the old "Climate Change" Narrative when it's been thrown under the bus because we need massive, reliable power generation to keep AI data centres running.
The AI data centers are focusing hard on being as green as they can, building out solar farms, wind farms, and nuclear power plants to provide power.
The only thing being thrown under the bus is the naïve "save power, save the planet" narrative that encouraged conservation, claiming that it would reduce global warming. It was never a plausible strategy, because power is a fundamental cost of doing business in the modern age.
Also, conserving power means discouraging investment in power production constr
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That's not universally true. For instance OpenAI is pushing for a massive new AI system in New Mexico called Project Jupiter. They plan to use natural gas for power and want a waiver from the state so they *don't* have to abide by the states requirements for clean power that applies to metered natural gas power plants.
Quoting from: https://sourcenm.com/2025/12/0... [sourcenm.com]
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That's not universally true. For instance OpenAI is pushing for a massive new AI system in New Mexico called Project Jupiter. They plan to use natural gas for power and want a waiver from the state so they *don't* have to abide by the states requirements for clean power that applies to metered natural gas power plants.
Let me restate that. The cloud computing companies that are doing AI (Google, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.) are largely trying to do the right thing as far as I can tell. Startups like OpenAI are a free-for-all as startups are wont to be. :-D
Re: But..... (Score:2)
Yeah, and while waiting responsibly for a miracle, they are sustainably running jet engines to produce electricity, which they promptly convert to waste heat in situ.
https://www.ft.com/content/8de... [ft.com]
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Yeah, and while waiting responsibly for a miracle, they are sustainably running jet engines to produce electricity, which they promptly convert to waste heat in situ.
https://www.ft.com/content/8de... [ft.com]
I can't read that story (paywall), but I'm looking at a Tom's Hardware story saying the same thing, and again, that's OpenAI. And the other article I found about folks doing this was about Crusoe, which is another startup.
I view crazy stories like that one as the fundamental difference between companies that know what they are doing and companies that don't. Companies that know what they are doing plan far enough ahead to have the grid capacity available by the time the lights come on, and throw piles of
Re: But..... (Score:2)
most of the electricity that is powering the AI waste is gas and coal, funny guy, about 60% in 2025.
Everyone is buying from the grid and gas and coal is what the grid has, therefore that's what everyone is using.
The remaining few percent are just virtue signaling .
But keep the faith.
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This seems to have triggered the climate change deniers even though TFA doesn't mention climate change at all.
TFA is about the problem that domesticated honey bees are invasive species which are damaging wild bee populations and we really need to help wild bee populations.
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At least they are trying.
Hopefully next time they will closer to the 'right' solution.
Science is all about making hypotheses and testing them. Mistakes happen all the time. It's part of good science.
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No, no the experts didn't get it wrong. The low information reactionaries got it wrong. To them there is one kind of bee and any bee is that kind of bee.
The article references non-experts who gave well intentioned bad advice and quotes experts who gave the more accurate better advice. It's been pretty well known to anybody who actually paid non-superficial attention to the issue that it was native bees that were under threat.
Re:Oh look (Score:5, Insightful)
The 'experts' got it all wrong again.
To be fair, I don't ever recall this issue being about protecting native bee biodiversity. It was always presented as "without bees to pollinate, you can kiss all these food crops goodbye!" As in, the threat had always been directed towards the agricultural industry (and by extension, anyone who liked eating foods that might go off the menu if the honeybees went *poof*). There was even some grocery store that attempted to raise awareness by sharing pictures on social media of empty shelves with all the produce removed that would be gone after a bee-pocalypse.
So, this is a bit revisionist to claim widespread support was for native bee biodiversity. I'd venture a guess most people were worried about what would or wouldn't be on their dinner plate and not which type of "bugs" will no longer be around to get splattered against their car's windshield.
To add to the original analogy in TFS: If you thought you might not be able to get eggs because of a "bird decline", you'd be entirely justified in your decision to start your own flock of chickens.
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Or looked at another way, there is no winning w/ this crowd. First they'll bitch that honeybees are going extinct, and after they are saved, they "find" out that we saved the "wrong" type of bees
Honestly, I don't care which bees survive, as long as the flowers get pollinated
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The trick is $$ (Score:2)
The trick is that keeping honeybees can bring in dollars. That's why honeybees were "saved". Your single hive in the back of your yard isn't a problem, the industry that transports hives all over the country is.
Of what financial value are "The bumblebees, sweat bees, mason bees, miner bees, leafcutters and other native bees"? Yeah, the same as clean water and air.
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> what the major pollinators are in this world. Hint: not bees.
Any links ?
All I'm finding is kind of vague and it puts all bees at roughly double the contribution of other all other insects.
I even watched the movie to show my support (Score:2)
But Jason Statham doesn't do documentaries.
Update (Score:5, Insightful)
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Native bees are critical for the rest of the fucking planet.
I kinda think that trumps this.
And they're actually not critical for many crops, tho helpful for larger yields. We already grow way more food than the human population can possibly consume. Distribution and affordability is more often the problem.
And don't get me started on how much is grown and effectively wasted on livestock.
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Said it before, will say it again: TOXIC EMPATHY (Score:2)
Toxic empathy at work, yet again.
Bad results, yet again.
The very definition of insanity. Doing the same thing over and over, and still get the same, shitty results.
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"Toxic empathy" isn't a thing that exists my dude. Its pseudoscientific clickbait nonsense. Its just "empathy" and its a vital part of how societies stay healthy. Empathy is *always* good, and that isn't controversial to anyone except crazy political assholes who get angry that people arent being racist enough.
And none of any of this has to do w
I'm confused (Score:2)
So by "honeybees" do we mean, like, actual honeybees, you know, the black and yellow bugs that fly around. Or is "honeybees" a code word for something majorly messed up, kind of like it turns out that the word "pizza" is code for something disturbing. Just asking, because 2026 is, um, you know.
There's always one... (Score:1)
oh look, a gullible herd (Score:2)
Whenever anyone says "everyone should do this thing" there are decent odds it's bullshit, spread by well-intentioned but ignorant people, or by not-so-benignly-intentioned people that know better but benefit from the outcome.
Meanwhile, if one is informed and tries to speak against the herd, it's pretty amazing in an anthropological sense how aggressive and angry "white knights" will pop up with no vested interest in the subject, only apparently in the argument itself.
And social media -which in any subject i
Americans (Score:1)